3 Times Businesses Saved Hours by Automating File Transfers

File transfers are something that companies of all sizes and across industries deal with. Especially for growing companies, file transfer tasks that seemed simple when the company was small can grow in complexity and volume until they are impossible to manage manually. When there are other criteria for the transfer, such as encryption, file transfer processes can consume even more time.

You might be surprised how much time a business can save simply by automating file transfers and related file management tasks. Here are three stories of companies that improved their processes (and their employees’ job enjoyment) by adopting business process automation software to automate file transfers.

Preferred Health Professionals Saved 50 Hours per Week

As a PPO network, Preferred Health Professionals (PHP) needed to receive medical claims submitted by hospitals and physicians, then forward the claims to employers or third-party administrators for payment. When more healthcare providers began sending the claims electronically rather than on paper, the work involved with the transfers started to overwhelm PHP’s 5-person IT team. That’s when they turned to AutoMate business process automation software.

At first, PHP simply automated a single process. AutoMate checked the FTP site at the same time every day, logged on, navigated to the appropriate page, clicked on the links containing the needed files, inserted the download destination, transferred the first file, waited for the download to finish, and then repeated the procedure until all files had been imported and placed in a folder for loading into the company's database.

Even this one task was enough to save IT several hours each day, but PHP didn’t stop there.

Writing too many custom scripts is a trap that many businesses fall into, but it can be inefficient, not to mention risky. InfraSource was struggling with all the scripting involved in their processes for depositing funds into Bank of America. They would write custom code in Visual Basic to extract positive payment data from their Spectrum Forefront accounting application, create a text file with the information, encrypt the text file, and then connect and send the file to the bank’s FTP site.

When they decided they needed a more efficient solution, the company turned to business process automation.

The Operations Manager for Information Technology Services at Health Plus PHSP realized that his team’s workload of repetitive manual tasks was getting unmanageable, and he set out to find a solution. Specifically, he wanted software that would allow his team to create, manage, and schedule tasks to automatically execute FTP and file management processes.

Health Plus initially purchased AutoMate for just two servers, but they were so impressed with its functionality that they wanted to know if there were additional opportunities to automate. To find out, they took advantage of AutoMate’s automation audit services.

One thing all these companies have in common is that they didn’t stop after automating just one task. That’s the beauty of business process automation software—you can streamline all of your interconnected business processes under one centralized solution for maximum time savings. Preferred Health Professionals eventually used AutoMate for over 175 processes.

Not sure if business process automation is the right solution for your organization? Check out this list of problems BPA can solve.